DeVoe: Georgia O'Keeffe: Sandie was a Rebel

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Georgia O’Keeffe’s arrival in Amarillo to begin a two-year teaching stint at Amarillo High. In commemoration of this centenary, the Amarillo Museum of Art is exhibiting its permanent collection, featuring its four O’Keeffes. Amarillo College, through its visionary and innovative Honors Program, is offering the only academic class in the nation dedicated to O’Keeffe, and it is my distinct privilege to teach that course.

I have often been asked why there is no monument to O’Keeffe sponsored by either the city of Amarillo or Amarillo Independent School District. The simple answer is, “A prophet (or prophetess) is never recognized in their own country!” It wasn’t until a decade after she left Amarillo that O’Keeffe would become recognized in the art world.

Indeed, her two years with AISD are a sort of black hole to art historians: she destroyed all of her art and, only a few of her letters, in contrast to her time in Canyon from 1916 to 1918 are preserved. Several facts about her Amarillo sojourn are known, and others can be inferred.

In the first place, she loved Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle. She described the Panhandle as “a land where the sky met the howling wind!” She said, long before her move to New Mexico, that “next to New York City, the Panhandle was the finest place she knew!” The year before she died, when asked what place, next to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, was most beautiful, O’Keeffe responded, without hesitation: “Amarillo, Texas!”

The Panhandle, in general, and Amarillo, in particular, liberated O’Keeffe artistically. The openness, the big sky and the unbounded freedom of the land empowered her to create. The reason there is no record of her works while here is that she threw away anything with which she was not happy, and in her months in the Magnolia Hotel on Polk Street she was evidently experimenting with an abstract style that would rock the world! The art world would begin seeing these abstracts within a year after she left Amarillo, but it is safe to assume the genesis for these works was undertaken while she taught at Amarillo High.

Amarillo High at the time was under construction, and O’Keeffe taught art classes in a local home. One anecdote relates that once she had a student bring a horse into the parlor of the house, and all students drew the horse from different angles! She was the type of teacher who made administrators nervous, as she refused to use the textbook. It takes a very secure administrator to support a teacher who ventures out of the curricular box: Georgia O’Keeffe did not enjoy that luxury in her principal, and, for that reason, was not rehired after her second year. To make an obvious play on words, it is correct to say that, for a Sandie, she was definitely a rebel.

Nonetheless, in this 100th anniversary of O’Keeffe’s time in Amarillo, the Chamber of Commerce and AISD need to follow the lead of Amarillo College and the AMoA and take proud ownership of Amarillo’s vital connection to the artist. The creative legacy of that connection continues in Amarillo’s prolific art scene: in fact, among cities of comparable size nationally, Amarillo is exceeded only by Santa Fe in terms of its prodigious production of the fine arts.

Regardless of the decisions of the Chamber or school district, we, as residents of Amarillo can celebrate O’Keeffe’s centenary individually. Every performance we attend of symphony or chamber music, First Friday at The Galleries at Sunset Center or every production of Lone Star Ballet, is a celebration of the creative legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Every time we see a magical sunrise or glorious sunset, every time we are exhilarated by the onset of a thunderstorm or a blue norther, we celebrate the inspiration that would culminate in the greatest female artist in history: Georgia O’Keeffe.

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Amarillo seems to like to ride on the coattails of WTAM. O'Keeffe's connection with West Texas A&M, the best small university in the A&M system, should be told as well. She was a rebel during her time in Canyon as one can read writings about her time at the college in Canyon. Amarillo has never quite realized the value of WT.